Send five Somerville employees through a live AI course and up to $15,000 can come back: up to 100% of tuition, capped at $3,000 per employee. You pay the invoice first. Reimbursement follows if the state approves.
Walk Somerville square by square. Assembly Row has retail, restaurants and newer office and lab space. Union Square, now on the Green Line, is adding life sciences buildings next to long-standing restaurants and markets. Davis Square has independent shops, venues, agencies and studios. In between are the contractors, remodelers and trades companies that work on the city's older two and three family homes. Many of these employers sit well inside the Express Program limit of 100 or fewer Massachusetts W-2 employees.
That list is the point of the training. Each line is work a small team does by hand every week, and work that staff can hand to AI once they know how.
Plenty of small teams already pay for tools with AI features nobody has learned to use. The gap is skill, not software. That is what this program funds: live, instructor-led courses, 10 instructional hours each, at $3,000 per trainee. The state reimburses up to 100% of the course cost, up to $3,000 per employee per course and $15,000 per company per calendar year. Software subscriptions are not covered. Training is.
You pay for the course first. After the training, you submit the provider invoice, proof of payment and trainee list, and the Commonwealth reimburses you under your approved application. Apply at least 21 days before the course start date. Approval is decided by Commonwealth Corporation and is never guaranteed. Our Massachusetts program overview has the full rules and the document list.
For restaurants, retailers, studios and nonprofits, the pick is AI Enablement for Small Business Teams. One cohort of up to 8 can mix a manager, a bookkeeper and front-of-house or admin staff, 2 hours a week for 5 weeks.
Somerville has a deep bench of contractors and trades companies, and AI for Field Service and Trades Businesses is aimed at them: the office manager, estimator, dispatcher and project coordinator who turn calls into scheduled, invoiced jobs.
Agencies with a data or reporting function, and operations teams in the life sciences space around Union Square and Assembly Row, should look at Claude Code for Operations and Data Teams. It is a smaller group (up to 6) on a tighter schedule: 2.5 hours a week for 4 weeks.
Every course is 10 instructional hours and $3,000 per trainee. A five-person cohort reaches the $15,000 annual Express cap, so a 12-person company can train close to half its staff in one calendar year and have up to the full tuition come back if approved.
No. The Express application is filed online by the employer with Commonwealth Corporation, the organization that administers the Workforce Training Fund Program. The MassHire Metro North Workforce Board is the regional workforce board for Somerville and a useful free resource for other hiring and training programs. It does not run this grant. Help with the Express application is free, because training providers are not allowed to charge for it.
Not on the grant. 1099 contractors and temp workers cannot be counted as trainees, and neither can owners. Reimbursement applies to W-2 payroll employees, full or part time, who work in Massachusetts. If your core team is six W-2 employees and ten freelancers, build the application around the six.
No. The grant reimburses the course cost. Consulting, coaching, one-on-one training, software subscriptions and work applying the training to your own systems are not covered. The purpose of the course is that your own staff can do more of that work. If you want outside help building it, JMK offers a separate free implementation audit, which is not part of the grant.